diff --git a/_posts/2018-12-06-notes-on-collective-governance.md b/_posts/2018-12-06-notes-on-collective-governance.md index 11d4877..8350739 100644 --- a/_posts/2018-12-06-notes-on-collective-governance.md +++ b/_posts/2018-12-06-notes-on-collective-governance.md @@ -1,12 +1,11 @@ --- layout: post title: Notes on Collective Governance +author: Katy Fetters summary: What can collective governance look like? What shape does that take? tags: [governance] --- -*by Katy Fetters* - Those of us looking to shape our enterprises with methods for collective governance and shared ownership are led to ask: *What can collective governance look like? What shape does that take? What are some of the challenges and freedoms presented in this model?* We spoke with several cooperative-minded experts who offered their insight into these questions, as part of a collaboration with the Action Network, a nonprofit online mobilization platform whose team is seeking to further democratize its operations. Here are a few takeaways from our discussion: diff --git a/_site/2018/12/06/notes-on-collective-governance.html b/_site/2018/12/06/notes-on-collective-governance.html index c67ae5e..d98e482 100644 --- a/_site/2018/12/06/notes-on-collective-governance.html +++ b/_site/2018/12/06/notes-on-collective-governance.html @@ -6,16 +6,17 @@ Notes on Collective Governance | Media Enterprise Design Lab @ CU Boulder + - - + + +{"datePublished":"2018-12-06T00:00:00-07:00","@type":"BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/2018/12/06/notes-on-collective-governance.html"},"url":"https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/2018/12/06/notes-on-collective-governance.html","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Katy Fetters"},"headline":"Notes on Collective Governance","description":"Those of us looking to shape our enterprises with methods for collective governance and shared ownership are led to ask: What can collective governance look like? What shape does that take? What are some of the challenges and freedoms presented in this model?","dateModified":"2018-12-06T00:00:00-07:00","@context":"http://schema.org"} @@ -50,13 +51,11 @@

Notes on Collective Governance

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by Katy Fetters

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Those of us looking to shape our enterprises with methods for collective governance and shared ownership are led to ask: What can collective governance look like? What shape does that take? What are some of the challenges and freedoms presented in this model?

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Those of us looking to shape our enterprises with methods for collective governance and shared ownership are led to ask: What can collective governance look like? What shape does that take? What are some of the challenges and freedoms presented in this model?

We spoke with several cooperative-minded experts who offered their insight into these questions, as part of a collaboration with the Action Network, a nonprofit online mobilization platform whose team is seeking to further democratize its operations. Here are a few takeaways from our discussion:

diff --git a/_site/about/index.html b/_site/about/index.html index 66e9ace..57addf4 100644 --- a/_site/about/index.html +++ b/_site/about/index.html @@ -73,6 +73,18 @@

Katy Fetters (MA student, Media and Public Engagement) is from Southern California and sometimes wishes she still lived near the beach no matter how charming Boulder is. She once lived out of a car and traveled down south for a good while to experience the allure of Patagonia with her boyfriend. To lend her voice and experience to issues around disability and identity, she started Cerebral Palsy Strong, #cpstrong in 2017. She came to CU to expand her understanding of media and culture to help build upon this work and hopes that it will start to change the way we think about what disability looks like. Katy holds a BA in Liberal Arts from Soka University of America.

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Faculty fellows @ CU Boulder

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diff --git a/_site/feed.xml b/_site/feed.xml index 52bfe5c..dcb98a7 100644 --- a/_site/feed.xml +++ b/_site/feed.xml @@ -1,4 +1,23 @@ -Jekyll2019-01-08T14:22:58-07:00https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/feed.xmlMedia Enterprise Design Lab @ CU BoulderThe Media Enterprise Design Lab is a think tank for community ownership and governance in media organizations, based at the University of Colorado Boulder's College of Media, Communication and Information.Hypothesis: ESOPs for the Online Economy2018-12-06T00:00:00-07:002018-12-06T00:00:00-07:00https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/2018/12/06/ESOPs-for-the-online-economy<p><em>by Nathan Schneider</em></p> +Jekyll2019-01-09T16:54:00-07:00https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/feed.xmlMedia Enterprise Design Lab @ CU BoulderThe Media Enterprise Design Lab is a think tank for community ownership and governance in media organizations, based at the University of Colorado Boulder's College of Media, Communication and Information.Organizations as Abstractions Over the Law2018-12-09T00:00:00-07:002018-12-09T00:00:00-07:00https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/2018/12/09/organizations-as-abstractions<p>The law, perhaps by definition, lags behind people working for social change. I certainly found this over and over in the next-generation cooperative projects I profiled in <em><a href="https://nathanschneider.info/e4e">Everything for Everyone</a></em>. One co-op in Catalonia was, legally, a mishmash of entities that presented themselves as if they were a coherent whole; another, in New Zealand, was an LLC that called itself a foundation but operated like a co-op. MEDLab has been working with Action Network, whose founder <a href="https://civichall.org/civicist/build-tech-with-movements/">describes</a> its innovative governance model as “cooperative,” even though the organization is mainly a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Some of these co-ops are more cooperative in practice than many “actual” co-ops; it’s just that the older co-op law was inadequate to meet their needs. They had to hack.</p> + +<p>Really, no organization is what the incorporation statutes and bylaws say it is. Organizations are made of people, culture, relationships, and other things that don’t fit into the letter of our laws, and which shouldn’t. This is especially the case for democratic enterprises trying to operate in a legal regime designed primarily for control by large investors and wealthy donors. Those seeking to develop new strategies for more accountable organizations have to be clever. They have to build the organizational structure as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_layer">layer of abstraction</a> quite distinct from the legal layer.</p> + +<p>Here are some examples of strategies I am talking about:</p> + +<ul> + <li>The Sustainable Economies Law Center supports and trains <strong><a href="https://www.theselc.org/worker_selfdirected_nonprofits">worker self-directed nonprofits</a></strong> (and is one itself), which operate as worker co-ops within the context of a 501(c)(3) organization</li> + <li>Some cooperatives <strong><a href="https://www.shareable.net/blog/forming-a-worker-coop-llc-or-cooperative-corporation">form as LLCs or other business entities</a></strong> and encode their cooperative practices in bylaws and contracts, rather than at the level of incorporation</li> + <li>A new startup, <a href="https://staffing.coop/">Staffing Cooperative</a>, is developing a new model in which <strong>the co-op serves as a holding company</strong> for non-cooperative subsidiaries, whose workers, in turn, become members of the co-op</li> + <li><a href="/medlab/assets/VirtualCoop.pdf">I have proposed a strategy</a> based on nonprofit fiscal sponsorship, through which <strong>early-stage co-ops can form without incorporation</strong> by operating within an umbrella entity, which may or may not be itself a co-op</li> +</ul> + +<p>Hacking up abstractions, however, runs into limits. For one thing, there can be tremendous advantages in taxation and regulatory treatment from using an incorporation statute designed with your kind of organization in mind; for instance, co-ops can facilitate early-stage community investment in ways that are simply not feasible for other companies. In some jurisdictions, too, it is outright illegal to call anything a co-op that is not incorporated as such. Finally, there is the danger of slippage. Many co-ops that are generations old have lost much of their democratic culture, and the only thing retaining even a modicum of accountability to their members is the fact that they are stuck in a cooperative legal statute. If democracy isn’t hard-coded into the organization, it becomes that much more vulnerable to defaulting back to the dominant, less-democratic paradigm.</p> + +<p>Misaligned legal and organizational layers can exact a cost over time. <a href="https://mayfirst.org/en/">May First/People Link</a>, an activist-oriented tech provider, is a nonprofit that has long identified as a “democratic membership organization,” in which member organizations and individuals elect the board. Again, it is probably more cooperative than many actual co-ops. But currently, the organization is discussing <a href="https://comment.mayfirst.org/t/mm-2018-form-a-committee-to-explore-converting-our-organization-to-a-multi-stake-holder-cooperative/910">a proposal</a> to make the legal transition to cooperative status. Over the years, MFPL’s democratic tendencies have generated both regulatory and organizational friction. Those advocating this shift see it as a means of “resolving contradictions and weaknesses in our current democratic structure”—and to more transparently communicate to members what their relationship and responsibilities to the organization should be.</p> + +<p>Hacking the law may be a strategy for innovation, but in the long run it probably can’t be a substitute for changing the law as well.</p> + +<p><em>Thanks to Brian Young of Action Network and Camille Kerr of Staffing Cooperative for their contributions to this conversation.</em></p>Nathan SchneiderThe law, perhaps by definition, lags behind people working for social change. I certainly found this over and over in the next-generation cooperative projects I profiled in Everything for Everyone. One co-op in Catalonia was, legally, a mishmash of entities that presented themselves as if they were a coherent whole; another, in New Zealand, was an LLC that called itself a foundation but operated like a co-op. MEDLab has been working with Action Network, whose founder describes its innovative governance model as “cooperative,” even though the organization is mainly a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Some of these co-ops are more cooperative in practice than many “actual” co-ops; it’s just that the older co-op law was inadequate to meet their needs. They had to hack.Hypothesis: ESOPs for the Online Economy2018-12-06T00:00:00-07:002018-12-06T00:00:00-07:00https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/2018/12/06/ESOPs-for-the-online-economy<p><em>by Nathan Schneider</em></p> <p>I work in a startup town, the rare kind of place where you can trip over veteran founders, with multiple exits behind then, on the sidewalk. By “exits,” I mean the end-goal of most tech-oriented startups—the moment when the startup is sold, either to a bigger company or, more rarely, to the investing public on the stock market. The whole culture of startup communities like Boulder is aimed toward this; it’s when founders and investors get their big payday. And yet this is the logic that turns our online infrastrutures into commodities. In the exit, it is often the data and loyalty of us the users that is being sold to the highest bidder.</p> @@ -19,9 +38,7 @@ <p>I am currently engaged in research on the feasibility of such models, with the support of a fellowship from Rutgers University’s <a href="https://smlr.rutgers.edu/content/institute-study-employee-ownership-and-profit-sharing">Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit-Sharing</a>. The first step is a paper with <a href="https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/1/morshed-mannan">Morshed Mannan</a>, a brilliant thinker on legal strategies for a more democratic online economy. We’re exploring what conditions would work best for this kind if exit, as well as the policies needed to make it more feasible.</p> -<p>More to come. <a href="https://www.zotero.org/ntnsndr/items/collectionKey/U298EBUI">Here’s a small bibliography-in-progress</a>. In the meantime, if this topic is related to your interests, I would love to hear from you.</p>by Nathan SchneiderNotes on Collective Governance2018-12-06T00:00:00-07:002018-12-06T00:00:00-07:00https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/2018/12/06/notes-on-collective-governance<p><em>by Katy Fetters</em></p> - -<p><img src="/medlab/assets/fetters-wave.jpg" style="float:right; width:50%; padding:10px;" />Those of us looking to shape our enterprises with methods for collective governance and shared ownership are led to ask: <em>What can collective governance look like? What shape does that take? What are some of the challenges and freedoms presented in this model?</em></p> +<p>More to come. <a href="https://www.zotero.org/ntnsndr/items/collectionKey/U298EBUI">Here’s a small bibliography-in-progress</a>. In the meantime, if this topic is related to your interests, I would love to hear from you.</p>by Nathan SchneiderNotes on Collective Governance2018-12-06T00:00:00-07:002018-12-06T00:00:00-07:00https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/2018/12/06/notes-on-collective-governance<p><img src="/medlab/assets/fetters-wave.jpg" style="float:right; width:50%; padding:10px;" />Those of us looking to shape our enterprises with methods for collective governance and shared ownership are led to ask: <em>What can collective governance look like? What shape does that take? What are some of the challenges and freedoms presented in this model?</em></p> <p>We spoke with several cooperative-minded experts who offered their insight into these questions, as part of a collaboration with the Action Network, a nonprofit online mobilization platform whose team is seeking to further democratize its operations. Here are a few takeaways from our discussion:</p> @@ -34,4 +51,4 @@ <p>If we think about a wave—the flow, the tide that pulls from within, it requires many forces working in tandem to build momentum and energy, enough to create the wave’s body and crest.</p> -<p><em>A special thanks to the participants in this discussion: Brian Young (executive director and founder, Action Network), Martha Grant (product manager, Action Network), Alanna Irving (team member, Open Collective; co-founder, Enspiral and Loomio), Chris Tittle (director of organizational resilience, Sustainable Economies Law Center), Margaret Vincent (senior counsel, Stocksy United).</em></p>by Katy Fetters \ No newline at end of file +<p><em>A special thanks to the participants in this discussion: Brian Young (executive director and founder, Action Network), Martha Grant (product manager, Action Network), Alanna Irving (team member, Open Collective; co-founder, Enspiral and Loomio), Chris Tittle (director of organizational resilience, Sustainable Economies Law Center), Margaret Vincent (senior counsel, Stocksy United).</em></p>Katy FettersThose of us looking to shape our enterprises with methods for collective governance and shared ownership are led to ask: What can collective governance look like? What shape does that take? What are some of the challenges and freedoms presented in this model? \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_site/posts/index.html b/_site/posts/index.html index 486f6a0..60bd47f 100644 --- a/_site/posts/index.html +++ b/_site/posts/index.html @@ -49,7 +49,14 @@
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